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Content which benefits the community (news, rumors, and discussions) is valued over content which benefits only the individual (technical questions, help buying/selling, rants, etc.). This fundamental difference in audience is why we support two communities, r/Apple and r/AppleHelp. If you'd like to view their content together, click here.

My friend offered to sell my his MacBook Pro 15" retina 2012 model, and it comes with 512GB of storage, and has 16 GB of ram. Would all of this be worth $1500, considering he bought it for twice that; or would it be more worth it to get a refurbished model from apple?

It isn't necessarily true anymore, in my experience. They're much easier to sell though, but I frequently encounter people who think their machine is worth more than it is. I regularly buy and sell on classified listings.

In reality, the depreciation rate seems to be in line with higher end machines from competitors like ASUS, Sony, Microsoft and Samsung. Warranty transfers are just much less or a headache with Apple devices. I've found that Apple machines depreciated faster within its first year, but it does so at a bit of a slower rate in its second and third year. The result is that they've achieved roughly the same percentage of its initial value as a competitor at the two and three year marks.

The $1500 value on the device is good for a three year old machine, but it isn't anything exceptional considering its initial price. The $2000-2400 value on the machine on the used market in the top-spec's first year was pretty poor value retention.

The issue here is the now larger issue of defrauded purchases that are resold as soon as the devices are released, for a much lower price. This weighs the entire market value down and is a result of Apple not caring enough about it to track the serial number.

Ask yourself how long of a life you want to get from a laptop, and how long of a life you plan to get from this one. Assuming this laptop would have the same lifespan as a brand new one bought today before it becomes obsolete, you need to ask yourself if sacrificing 2 years from it's useful life is worth the money saved. If you think you can get say 4 years out of it (you can, but it'll likely be rather bogged down if you keep updating the OS), the price per year is $375. If you assume the same 6 year life for a new one, it would need to come in under $2250 after tax to beat the spread. This same logic can be used to figure out if an upgrade is worth it if you think it'll extend the useful life of the device, vs purchasing cheaper options more frequently.

I always tell people this when they want to buy the year-old iPhone instead of the new one in order to save $100. Considering it's a ~$700 phone with a 3-year lifespan before it becomes obsolete (yes it'll still work, but it will be awfully slow on the new iOS), each year costs roughly $230. So cutting out a whole year out of that useful life in order to save $100 brings the cost down to $600, but the price per year to around $300 since it'll only last 2 years. Doesn't add up in the case of an iPhone. Of course, people buy them carrier-subsidized and think it's $100 instead of $200, not realizing that the real cost is amortized through their monthly payments.

Of course this is all based on the assumption that the new device has approximately the same lifespan as the discounted device in question, and you're using the device to the very limit of it's useful life or selling it for a fair price when you're done with it.

(one of) The awesome thing(s) about Macs is there is a very visible secondary market on ebay. Get the exact model number (e.g., MC976LL/A) search for recently closed auctions with the exact configuration of this rMBP. This will show you exactly what the market value of that Mac is right now.

Gotta love it when people make generalizations like that. Yes, it's the same year model, NO, the model that he's buying is much nicer than the base model. I had a friend tell me something similar, he only paid $2200 for his MBP 2011, while I paid $3100 for my MBP 2011 model, as I had the better screen, CPU, GPU, RAM and HDD. He said I got ripped, but didn't take the extras into account.

You're right I didn't. Also think I had one of those student 100$ off things.

On the flip side, the upgraded CPU is only a marginal upgrade, something like 6 or 7% better in the best of circumstances. The added RAM has little value if you're not using extremely memory-intensive applications and the storage is an expensive upgrade that's useless if you don't actually use it.

I'd probably pick a base 2014 rMBP over paying that much for a two year old model. The GPU and CPU upgrades will be much more significant.

Some of the recent updates to the MBPr line were more based on power consumption rather than processing power. The main benefits are thunderbolt 2.0 and PCIE based SSD. Raw power is very similar. Its a good deal

Added ram is basically future proofing your machine for future applications which will use more memory. And 256gb is easy to fill. Anybody would appreciate the extra space. Either way he's getting a good Mac for a great price that's well under what most people are listing it for.